The present disclosure relates generally to tools and techniques for data management, and more specifically, to systems and methods for annotating electronically-stored data with user-viewable, machine-readable, persistent, electronic tick marks.
When performing an audit, it has long been conventional for auditors to prepare schedules, analyses, transcriptions, memos, and confirmation results to be included in one or more documents generally referred to as work papers. These work papers serve as the basis for documenting the work performed by the auditor during the auditor's examination and evaluation of an entity's accounting and/or financial records—in the case of a financial audit—or, policies and operations—in the case of an internal or compliance audit. The work papers may ultimately be relied upon to support an auditor's opinion regarding the financial “fairness” of the financial statements, or an opinion expressing the extent to which an entity is in compliance with a certain set of internal or external policies and regulations.
During the audit process, it is customary for auditors to manually (e.g., by hand) annotate the work papers with various symbols, commonly referred to as tick marks, to convey certain information about the audit process. For example, as illustrated in FIG. 1, an auditor may place a checkmark symbol 10 next to a particular item in the work papers 12 to indicate that the auditor examined corresponding source documents 14 related to the particular item. If, for example, the item in the work papers is a brief statement regarding the value of a particular financial asset, a checkmark symbol 10 placed next to the brief statement may be used to indicate that the auditor has verified the accuracy of the brief statement by examining one or more supporting financial documents 14 associated with the corresponding financial asset. Different tick mark symbols may be used to convey different information about the audit process. The meaning of each type of tick mark can typically be found in a tick mark legend 16, which is often included with or attached to the work papers 12.
Although tick marks have long been associated with the audit process, tick marks are also frequently used by internal accounting personnel when preparing documents, such as regulatory filings. Despite the increased reliance on modern computer and software systems for preparing documents and performing audit-related tasks, the practice of using tick marks has changed very little. For instance, when using conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications to prepare documents and/or perform audit-related tasks, accounting personnel and auditors will frequently utilize one or more numbers, letters or symbols, such as an asterisk (“*”), as electronic versions of tick mark symbols. In some cases, the Microsoft Wingdings® font, which renders characters as a variety of symbols, is used to represent various tick mark symbols. In any case, the characters representing the tick mark symbols are typically generated within the framework of whatever conventional document processing or spreadsheet application is being used. For example, using a spreadsheet application, an auditor may place an asterisk (“*”) in a cell of a worksheet to convey some information about a value in a neighboring cell of the worksheet.
Utilizing electronic tick mark symbols with conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications poses a variety of problems. First, with conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications, it is extremely easy to modify data and/or create a new copy or version of a document or file. Consequently, a tick mark symbol present in one version of a document or file may become lost or corrupt on subsequent versions of the document or file. Furthermore, an item or value presented in one document may be dependent (e.g., by means of a reference, formula, or link) upon an item or value in one or more other documents.
Consequently, an item or value associated with a particular tick mark may change, thereby causing the tick mark and its corresponding legend to become irrelevant or invalid. In addition, the tick mark legend that explains the meaning of each tick mark symbol may become lost, disassociated or stale, thereby rendering tick marks included in a particular document or file irrelevant or invalid.
Finally, even when a tick mark in a document or file is valid, the tick mark and its associated entry in the tick mark legend may not provide sufficient and relevant information regarding the validation and verification process, or the supporting documents, files and database items that have been referenced by an auditor. These shortcomings frequently cause unwanted errors, wasted efforts and higher costs associated with manually reviewing and re-reviewing successive versions of documents to ensure that they are correct.
The traditional accounting practices have made heavy use of the concept of support binders and their relationship to forms, reports, and documents that are presented, filed, or otherwise produced. Historically, evidence supporting a report, filing, or other summary of data, particularly with regard to financial records, has been kept in numerous physical binders that are located in shelves or stored in boxes. These physical binders contain paper that serves as the definition for forms, letters, spreadsheets, data aggregations, and reports. For many reasons, utilizing such physical binders is less than ideal, including difficulty in accessing data, moving information around, updating, vulnerability to damage and loss, etc.
In short, the support binders contain information that is not presented, filed or produced, but serve to contain supporting evidence for the information that is-such documents can be referred to as “supporting documentation” or “work papers”. By way of example, a person may file a 1040 form containing their income tax statement which contains a Schedule A form identifying various deductions the filer is permitted to claim. Although both the 1040 and the Schedule A form are filed with the IRS, supporting documentation, such as receipts for charitable donations are not. Nonetheless, this supporting documentation must be kept on-hand in case the person's taxes are audited, since it serves as the basis for information on the forms that are filed.
Businesses do the same thing when they filing their 10-Q or 10-K forms with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The form may be over one hundred pages and is full of numbers—each of which are supported by a supporting document. All of these supporting documents are grouped together and kept in a “support binder”, which is traditionally a plurality of three-ring binders that are co-located on a shelf, in a drawer or cabinet, etc.
These source supporting documents can be a wider variety of document types and may originate from many different areas of the business. For example, they may come out of the business' main centralized financial system or they might come from different departments. They might be internal financial reports and might contain justification of numbers. Supporting documents can be as unstructured as an email from the CFO providing particular wording for a particular group of numbers. Thus, supporting documents can not only support numbers, but they can also support text or wording in the final document. The entire collection of supporting documents bundled together forms the support binder.
Historically, a support binder has been largely a physical paper-based system comprising many three-ring binders, even when other aspects of the reporting are electronic. In this context, the process of “ticking and tying” has been a very manually intensive process. An accountant will sit down at their desk with a one hundred and twenty page filing document, and have all of the supporting documents in a pile on their desk. The accountant then goes through with a pen and “ticks” each relevant value, text field, etc. requiring support in the filing document once it is located in the supporting document.
An annotation is made in the supporting document regarding its use in the filing document, which constitutes the “tie”. The tick and tie are each created with some form of annotation such as a bracket, arrow, circle, etc., and are usually initialed and dated by the accountant or person doing the review. Often another individual, such as an approver, will go through the same procedure to check the original reviewer's work, and they will also initial and date the documents, indicating that they verified the ticks and ties created by the original reviewer. Since each page of the one hundred and twenty page form will likely have multiple ticks and ties, such a process is very labor intensive and can take two to upwards of five days to work through such a form and properly tick and tie it.
Furthermore, reviewers of manual documents cannot fully appreciate the relationships between values just by looking at a printed copy, i.e., know which other values will or will not change, based on the changing of a first value.
It has long been desirable to keep both the filing documents and related supporting documents in electronic form in order to offset the difficulties noted above with respect to paper filings. However, encompassing all of the functionality of traditional binders has proven difficult to fully implement electronically.